Part 8 (1/2)

Lovers may love G.o.d in one another; I do not deny it. That is no reason why the imitation and outward form of this great happiness should be made an obligation upon all men and women who are attracted by one another, nor why it should be woven into the essentials of religion.

For women much more than for men is this confusion dangerous, lest a personal love should shape and dominate their lives instead of G.o.d. ”He for G.o.d only; she for G.o.d in him,” phrases the idea of Milton and of ancient Islam; it is the formula of s.e.xual infatuation, a formula quite easily inverted, as the end of Goethe's Faust (”The woman soul leadeth us upward and on”) may witness. The whole drift of modern religious feeling is against this exaggeration of s.e.xual feeling, these moods of s.e.xual slavishness, in spiritual things. Between the healthy love of ordinary mortal lovers in love and the love of G.o.d, there is an essential contrast and opposition in this, that preference, exclusiveness, and jealousy seem to be in the very nature of the former and are absolutely incompatible with the latter. The former is the intensest realisation of which our individualities are capable; the latter is the way of escape from the limitations of individuality. It may be true that a few men and more women do achieve the completest unselfishness and self-abandonment in earthly love. So the poets and romancers tell us. If so, it is that by an imaginative perversion they have given to some attractive person a wors.h.i.+p that should be reserved for G.o.d and a devotion that is normally evoked only by little children in their mother's heart. It is not the way between most of the men and women one meets in this world.

But between G.o.d and the believer there is no other way, there is nothing else, but self-surrender and the ending of self.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND d.a.m.nATION

1. THE BIOLOGICAL EQUIVALENT OF SIN

If the reader who is unfamiliar with scientific things will obtain and read Metchnikoff's ”Nature of Man,” he will find there an interesting summary of the biological facts that bear upon and destroy the delusion that there is such a thing as individual perfection, that there is even ideal perfection for humanity. With an abundance of convincing instances Professor Metchnikoff demonstrates that life is a system of ”disharmonies,” capable of no perfect way, that there is no ”perfect”

dieting, no ”perfect” s.e.xual life, no ”perfect” happiness, no ”perfect”

conduct. He releases one from the arbitrary but all too easy a.s.sumption that there is even an ideal ”perfection” in organic life. He sweeps out of the mind with all the confidence and conviction of a physiological specialist, any idea that there is a perfect man or a conceivable perfect man. It is in the nature of every man to fall short at every point from perfection. From the biological point of view we are as individuals a series of involuntary ”tries” on the part of an imperfect species towards an unknown end.

Our spiritual nature follows our bodily as a glove follows a hand.

We are disharmonious beings and salvation no more makes an end to the defects of our souls than it makes an end to the decay of our teeth or to those vestigial structures of our body that endanger our physical welfare. Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds not an inch to our spiritual and moral stature.

2. WHAT IS d.a.m.nATION?

Let us now take up the question of what is Sin? and what we mean by the term ”d.a.m.nation,” in the light of this view of human reality. Most of the great world religions are as clear as Professor Metchnikoff that life in the world is a tangle of disharmonies, and in most cases they supply a more or less myth-like explanation, they declare that evil is one side of the conflict between Ahriman and Ormazd, or that it is the punishment of an act of disobedience, of the fall of man and world alike from a state of harmony. Their case, like his, is that THIS world is d.a.m.ned.

We do not find the belief that superposed upon the miseries of this world there are the still bitterer miseries of punishments after death, so nearly universal. The endless punishments of h.e.l.l appear to be an exploit of theory; they have a superadded appearance even in the Christian system; the same common tendency to superlatives and absolutes that makes men ashamed to admit that G.o.d is finite, makes them seek to enhance the merits of their Saviour by the device of everlasting fire.

Conquest over the sorrow of life and the fear of death do not seem to them sufficient for Christ's glory.

Now the turning round of the modern mind from a conception of the universe as something derived deductively from the past to a conception of it as something gathering itself adventurously towards the future, involves a release from the supposed necessity to tell a story and explain why. Instead comes the inquiry, ”To what end?” We can say without mental discomfort, these disharmonies are here, this d.a.m.nation is here--inexplicably. We can, without any distressful inquiry into ultimate origins, bring our minds to the conception of a spontaneous and developing G.o.d arising out of those stresses in our hearts and in the universe, and arising to overcome them. Salvation for the individual is escape from the individual distress at disharmony and the individual defeat by death, into the Kingdom of G.o.d. And d.a.m.nation can be nothing more and nothing less than the failure or inability or disinclination to make that escape.

Something of that idea of d.a.m.nation as a lack of the will for salvation has crept at a number of points into contemporary religious thought. It was the fine fancy of Swedenborg that the d.a.m.ned go to their own h.e.l.ls of their own accord. It underlies a queer poem, ”Simpson,” by that interesting essayist upon modern Christianity, Mr. Clutton Brock, which I have recently read. Simpson dies and goes to h.e.l.l--it is rather like the Cromwell Road--and approves of it very highly, and then and then only is he completely d.a.m.ned. Not to realise that one can be d.a.m.ned is certainly to be d.a.m.ned; such is Mr. Brock's idea. It is his definition of d.a.m.nation. Satisfaction with existing things is d.a.m.nation. It is surrender to limitation; it is acquiescence in ”disharmony”; it is making peace with that enemy against whom G.o.d fights for ever.

(But whether there are indeed Simpsons who acquiesce always and for ever remains for me, as I have already confessed in the previous chapter, a quite open question. My Arminian temperament turns me from the Calvinistic conclusion of Mr. Brock's satire.)

3. SIN IS NOT d.a.m.nATION

Now the question of sin will hardly concern those d.a.m.ned and lost by nature, if such there be. Sin is not the same thing as d.a.m.nation, as we have just defined d.a.m.nation. d.a.m.nation is a state, but sin is an incident. One is an essential and the other an incidental separation from G.o.d. It is possible to sin without being d.a.m.ned; and to be d.a.m.ned is to be in a state when sin scarcely matters, like ink upon a blackamoor. You cannot have questions of more or less among absolute things.

It is the amazing and distressful discovery of every believer so soon as the first exaltation of belief is past, that one does not remain always in touch with G.o.d. At first it seems incredible that one should ever have any motive again that is not also G.o.d's motive. Then one finds oneself caught unawares by a base impulse. We discover that discontinuousness of our apparently h.o.m.ogeneous selves, the unincorporated and warring elements that seemed at first altogether absent from the synthesis of conversion. We are tripped up by forgetfulness, by distraction, by old habits, by tricks of appearance.

There come dull patches of existence; those mysterious obliterations of one's finer sense that are due at times to the little minor poisons one eats or drinks, to phases of fatigue, ill-health and bodily disorder, or one is betrayed by some unantic.i.p.ated storm of emotion, brewed deep in the animal being and released by any trifling accident, such as personal jealousy or l.u.s.t, or one is relaxed by contentment into vanity.

All these rebel forces of our ill-coordinated selves, all these ”disharmonies,” of the inner being, s.n.a.t.c.h us away from our devotion to G.o.d's service, carry us off to follies, offences, unkindness, waste, and leave us compromised, involved, and regretful, perplexed by a hundred difficulties we have put in our own way back to G.o.d.

This is the personal problem of Sin. Here prayer avails; here G.o.d can help us. From G.o.d comes the strength to repent and make such reparation as we can, to begin the battle again further back and lower down. From G.o.d comes the power to antic.i.p.ate the struggle with one's rebel self, and to resist and prevail over it.